Data-Over-Cable Service Interface Specifications (“DOCSIS”) has been established by cable television network operators to facilitate transporting data traffic, primarily internet traffic, over existing community antenna television (“CATV”) networks. In addition to transporting data traffic as well as television content signals over a CATV network, multiple services operators (“MSO”) also use their CATV network infrastructure for carrying voice, video on demand (“VoD”) and video conferencing traffic signals, among other types.
In transporting downstream multimedia content, as well as data, an upstream message, or messages, is/are typically sent to request the content and to set up a service flow to deliver the content. In addition to downstream multimedia content, such as video, voice traffic also uses message signaling to set up service flows for the upstream and downstream directions. This message signaling traffic is bursty over short intervals while setting up and tearing down calls, for example, and is very latency sensitive.
In deployment that combine voice and data on a DOCSIS CMTS, channels are often oversubscribed, and therefore have a tendency at times to be over driven such that some data cannot get through to its destination, and is dropped. Even if message signaling is elevated to higher classification Best Effort (“BE”) flows, for example, some packets of these message signals may still get dropped. Furthermore, even if all packets are ultimately received, they likely will be received after significant delay, such delay typically being characterized in the art as latency.
This typically occurs to traffic over channels that have a high percentage of standing calls and a large media terminal adaptor (“MTA”) population. Therefore, with control message signal flows classified as BE flows, and since there may be many such flows using the same upstream chancel, there are typically many BE flows vying for a given number of contention intervals during which to make bandwidth request. Thus, some delay will inevitably result due to collisions of requests from competing BE flows for bandwidth.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a method and system for providing adequate bandwidth for high priority traffic, such as message signals, using a BE flow, when requesting bandwidth during set-up of a voice call service flow.